The Useless College Degree

real talk

- it's the last week of the semester and I have a college class (usually biology or a literature class) that I haven't shown up to all semester and I have to go in pretend like I've been there the whole time and figure out how to pass

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, August 13, 2016 12:33 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hah yes this one!

school nightmares aren't as traumatic as service industry nightmares though

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, August 13, 2016 12:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

weirdly I also have concurrent dreams about still working at the mexican restaurant I did 14 years ago. in one of the dreams recently I was "fired" so I was hoping that was the end but nope....brain did a reboot of the series.

i have a recurring nightmare that i am forced to live in a cockroach infested apartment that is attached to a particularly bad job, so i just go downstairs during the day to the job and upstairs at night to the cockroaches

these aren't normal cockroaches though. they are sort of based on horseshoe crabs.

JOe's Apartment

I don't think humanities degrees are useless, but it really does seem to me that you need to be a sort of life acrobat, very outgoing and confident, in order to magic that kind of degree into a career. The sort of person who can 'network'. Or who may have kinda sorta been born into a few networks in the first place.

I say this after about 10 years of failing to get anywhere in journalism, publishing, or marketing, which was the idea when I went to university. At this point I don't have anything resembling a 'career', as such, only jobs (now and then, with rough stretches in between). Other people have got places though, with roughly the same education as me, and the education has been a key part of getting them there.

A friend of mine shared this on FB today: Four years ago she collected two degrees from UT-Austin. Two weeks ago she interviewed for a server job with four different managers at the same company/restaurant and doesn't hear back.

Even with all the grads who say they can't find work, I feel a lot more precarious as a 30-something with half a degree in fine arts and 2/3 of a degree in history.

Seriously considering starting from almost zero in accounting via a local community college's online program and then transferring. It doesn't have a lot of relevance to my immediate life but at the same time it gives me a parachute in a field that does seem to be producing subsistence level jobs at a decent rate.

Occasionally I'm not super sympathetic with grads in that situation, though - an acquaintance went back and graduated at 32 with a degree in marketing but he's driving Uber and constantly complaining that none of the music marketing jobs he applies for will hire him. Doesn't apply to anything outside of promotion/artist management/etc. jobs.. and the one time he did have a job in the industry it paid so little he was borrowing money to survive from his elderly parents.

school nightmares aren't as traumatic as service industry nightmares though

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, August 13, 2016 4:34 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

stay in school nightmares, kids

xxp that's funny, milo, i was thinking the same thing - while paging through an accounting ethics textbook i'm going to use for a business ethics class i have to teach. then i was wondering if i should conceal my educational background so my imaginary accounting professor wouldn't make fun of me and call me 'doctor'.

the question of whether or not it was worth it for me to go to college, or graduate school, doesn't really make much sense. realistically if i hadn't gone it would have meant trying to work my way into the tech industry in the 90s, following $$$$ at a moment when talent and informal knowledge were enough to get you ahead. but i had half a BS by the time i 'went to college' at 18 and two degrees and most of an MS by the time i was done five years later, and then a phd, all veering toward the most useless fields of study you could want, making me a more and more academic person along the way. it wasn't about the credentials for me, i just believed that what i should be was as educated as possible, most likely to become a professor in something. like cardamon i know lots of people in my circles who have gotten somewhere with roughly the same, or less, but aside from networking or background connections it seems like they've mostly just been fortunate to be counted useful. say from specializing in the things that are in demand, from having the experience to teach that one class, from having the attitude to fit in with a certain group. mostly just thanks to the incredible standardization/functionalization of our labor market.

i've never been entrepreneurial and i've never been any kind of joiner. unfortunately i also never really concentrated on making myself useful to others; it has happened that i was useful sometimes. mostly i pursued my education with reference to myself, and not even to what would be most useful for me. i think that in terms of 'uselessness' the trick with college is probably finding a way to make sure you're useful to others, if nothing else, because lacking those other sources of... whatever, that gets you places and keeps you going... you will remain dependent upon others finding you useful somehow, for most of your life.

very otm

Treesh, I'm sorry to hear that your college memories are so unhappy, but what you describe sounds pretty standard for me and most of my social circle: drugs, alcohol, doomed relationships, despair, self-doubt, retreat into fantasy, one or more psychological rough patches, way too much lit crit.

On some level I half-suspect that is more or less how college is supposed to go, and that going through those things was as indispensable a part of the learning process as anything I heard from a professor in a classroom. Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from poor judgement.

My B.A.'s usefulness was limited to getting me over the minimum requirements for getting into a graduate program. My M.S. has definitely been worth actual money in the bank. And I got the company to pay for it. I've been an incredibly fortunate son of a bitch.

Not as fortunate as someone born in europe tbf

them's fightin words

thats a more localised birthright tbh

Srsly tho

Didnt get into first choice (law) by a matter of a few points, took a year off for family reasons, did a business degree at the local technical institite to enable me to stay in town, got me into the public sector and took me 8 years to get back to get an IT degree. Cant imagine having managed any of it under a debt system.

i went to college for free and was paid to work thru grad school (per usual in the states), with a bit of loan debt to make the latter more doable. i don't know what i would have chosen to do if i were paying for college, probably gotten a computer science degree. : /

xp my memories are not as bad as that makes them sound. but those years do seem kind of arbitrary in hindsight.. i think it wasn't the right time for me to be pursuing higher education. i guess everyone is different but at 18-22 i was quite young and had very little grasp of the world

i believe in the gap year. and also in pursuing humanistic learning throughout one's life rather than as an undergraduate focus.

in denmark i remember going to a party at this weird residential school that was like, in between high school and undergrad. at one point all this amazing food appeared but i didn't see any kitchen facilities or staff. they seemed to have dance parties every night at this place.

looked it up -- it was called a Folkehøjskole. i'm probably explaining it wrong, but i remember they didn't have grades and it was in the middle of the woods basically, deep in the copenhagen suburbs

or the suburbs of cph rather

pursuing humanistic learning throughout one's life rather than as an undergraduate focus.

― Treeship

iirc u either get a degree or u gain credit by sharing the correct blogs on message boards

not blogs, anecdotes

With 50 year working lives approaching soon, it wont be an issue of either/or (life-learning vs undergrad).

An undergraduate degree, or masters, in your early 20s isn't going to last 40 to 45 years, so you can get to have at least one more go at it, if not two. You might need to choose which student debts you want to pass on to your heirs.

Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/02/meet-the-parents-who-wont-let-their-children-study-literature/?hpid=hp_regional-hp-cards_rhp-card-posteverything%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.f5ebc1131368

"at George Mason University"

stopped reading there

But seriously you should look at GMU's list of the world-changing titans who studied English! I mean, Howard Cosell, Tom Clancy, Emma Watson, Clarence Thomas, AND Mark Knopfler!

Who would not wish to be among such company as they begin their career journey. I mean, the list even includes a former EPA head and numerous prominent librarians.